The present invention generally relates to anatomy labeling on a picture archiving and communication system (PACS). In particular, the present invention relates to anatomy labeling on a PACS to enable anatomy specific image presentation and analysis.
A clinical or healthcare environment is a crowded, demanding environment that would benefit from organization and improved ease of use of imaging systems, data storage systems, and other equipment used in the healthcare environment. A healthcare environment, such as a hospital or clinic, encompasses a large array of professionals, patients, and equipment. Personnel in a healthcare facility must manage a plurality of patients, systems, and tasks to provide quality service to patients. Healthcare personnel may encounter many difficulties or obstacles in their workflow.
Healthcare environments, such as hospitals or clinics, include clinical information systems, such as hospital information systems (HIS) and radiology information systems (RIS), and storage systems, such as picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). Information stored may include patient medical histories, imaging data, test results, diagnosis information, management information, and/or scheduling information, for example. The information may be centrally stored or divided at a plurality of locations. Healthcare practitioners may desire to access patient information or other information at various points in a healthcare workflow. For example, during surgery, medical personnel may access patient information, such as images of a patient's anatomy, that are stored in a medical information system. Alternatively, medical personnel may enter new information, such as history, diagnostic, or treatment information, into a medical information system during an ongoing medical procedure.
A PACS may connect to medical diagnostic imaging devices and employ an acquisition gateway (between the acquisition device and the PACS), storage and archiving units, display workstations, databases, and sophisticated data processors. These components are integrated together by a communication network and data management system. A PACS has, in general, the overall goals of streamlining health-care operations, facilitating distributed remote examination and diagnosis, and improving patient care.
A typical application of a PACS system is to provide one or more medical images for examination by a medical professional. For example, a PACS system may provide a series of x-ray images to a display workstation where the images are displayed for a radiologist to perform a diagnostic examination. Based on the presentation of these images, the radiologist may provide a diagnosis. For example, the radiologist may diagnose a tumor or lesion in x-ray images of a patient's lungs.
Computed tomography (“CT”) exams may include images that are acquired from scanning large sections of a patients' body. For example, a chest/abdomen/pelvis CT exam includes one or more images of several different anatomy. Each anatomy may be better viewed under different window level settings, however. Thus, when a radiologist or other personnel is interpreting a chest/abdomen/pelvis CT exam, he or she switches among different settings to view images for different anatomy, for example.
Currently, image review workstations may not correlate image content to anatomy to facilitate presentation of relevant anatomical data. However, healthcare personnel, such as radiologists, may be interested to view information about specific anatomical structures and/or other patient data when viewing and/or interpreting patient image(s). For example, when a radiologist is viewing a CT axial image that contains the liver, he or she may want to learn about the disease processes associated with the liver or the patient's lab tests associated with the liver. Thus, an image review workstation having the capability to recognize an anatomy of interest, such as a liver, and search for and present anatomy-related information to a user would be highly desirable.
During an exam interpretation process, radiologists and/or other healthcare personnel may like to note image findings as a mechanism to compose reports. In the case of structured reports, radiologists have found that the mechanism to input data is too cumbersome. That is, since there are so many possible findings related to an exam procedure, the findings need to be categorized in some hierarchy structure. The numerous hierarchical levels and choices of selection require extensive manual manipulation from the radiologist.
For example, a chest/abdomen/pelvis CT exam may include images of the liver, pancreas, stomach, etc. If a radiologist wants to input a finding related to the liver, he or she must currently traverse through a hierarchy of choices presented in a graphical user interface before being able to identify the desired finding.
When radiologists are viewing patients' images in the exam interpretation process, sometimes they would like to view the images specific to certain organs. For example, a patient with a history of colon cancer has a CT exam that contains images of the stomach, small intestine, liver, pancreas, colon, etc. A radiologist may want to first view the images of the colon. If the colon does not demonstrate any remarkable abnormalities, then the radiologist may suspect that the reported symptoms are related to ailments in the liver and wants to view the images containing the liver. However, there is currently no method on image review workstations that enables a radiologist to view images specific to organs. A radiologist may only view images in sequential order.
Physicians, radiologists and/or other healthcare practitioners often request multiple scans for a patient over a period of time either because 1) they suspect that the patient is suffering from a particular ailment or 2) the patient is already undergoing treatment and they want to monitor his or her progress. When a radiologist is reading a patient's exam, for example, it is important for him or her to have access to the patient's previous exams, which enable the radiologist to better understand the patient and to monitor the changes that have occurred since the patient's last exam. For example, when a chest radiologist finds a nodule in the current exam, he will also look for the nodule in the previous exams, to see if there is any change in the size or volume of the nodule.
Hanging protocols automatically allow a radiologist or other user to see current and historical exams for a patient simultaneously. Currently, if a radiologist or other user identifies a nodule in an image in a current exam, the user must manually cine through previous exams to find the corresponding image at the same location, and observe the difference in images. When a patient has several previous exams, a radiologist or other user must spend a considerable amount of time to manual locate a slice in each exam. Even if image slices are to be synchronized or linked, a radiologist must first manually find the same image in each exam before enabling the synchronization for future retrieval based on DICOM information.
Thus, a method and system that improve review efficiency would be highly desirable. A method and system for better retrieval of relevant patient information and images would be highly desirable.